LIE: The meaning of life is an unfathomable mystery

Lie:      The meaning of life is an unfathomable mystery.

Truth: The core of life’s meaning is clear: to adore and glorify God.

No doubt about it, life is mysterious. Science, or rather Scientism, has worked overtime to extract all mystery out of it. It’s attempting to reduce life to organic compounds, processing and electro-chemical signaling. Yet the average person simply doesn’t believe it – it’s quite unbelievable as a ‘faith.’ What we’re left with is a confusing emptiness, a mystery of a mystery. But God never intended it to be so.

I will also admit that our individual lives have a meaning and a purpose that is not readily discovered. We are deep beings and we will spend a lifetime discovering all that our lives mean.

But other than the enemy’s deliberate efforts to obfuscate, there’s a reason we find it hard to grasp the mystery, what I’m calling the core meaning of our lives. In his book, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, Roger Scruton gives us an important insight into our modern difficulty with accepting this end, or to any end.

Rational activity involves both ends and means. In a technological age we acquire an increasing grasp of the means to our goals, and a decreasing grasp of the reasons why we should pursue them. The clarity of purpose that I observed in Homer’s Odysseus is not a clarity about means: it is a clarity about ends, about the things that are worth doing for their own sake, like grieving and loving and honouring the gods. The mastery of means that emancipated mankind from drudgery has brought with it a mystery of ends – an inability to answer, to one’s own satisfaction, the question what to feel or do. The mystery deepens with the advent of the consumer society, when all the channels of social life are devoted to consumption. For consumption, in its everyday form, is not really an end. It destroys the thing consumed and leaves us empty-handed: the consumer’s goals are perpetually recurring illusions, which vanish at the very moment they loom into view, destroyed by the appetite that seeks them. The consumer society is therefore phantasmagoric, a place in which the ghosts of satisfactions are pursued by the ghosts of real desires.[1]

In other words, most of us find it hard to keep the end in view – that is, life’s core meaning – because the clutter of means and methods clouds our vision; we ‘can’t see the forest for the trees.’ We’ve reversed ends and means and used ends to gain more means. We’ve even used God, the ultimate end, to get money, the ultimate means (at least in our modern world).

A big part of this blindness to the grand goal of man – the core meaning of our lives – according to Scruton is our preoccupation, our desperation to consume, to acquire, to get things: food, images, news, information, money, clothes.

So we need to become reacquainted with the beauty of ends. What do I mean? Ends are those things that are not means, ends are what we enjoy for their own sake — things like conversation, not for any agenda, but just to sit down and talk because we recognize another human being whom God loves; things like singing or making music or dancing to the music or on a Sunday morning (or any day) to be fully present to worship God, to bow our head and sincerely thank him, not to try to get on his good side or make ourselves feel better or look good, but for no other reason than the fact that he’s been good to us and that we should thank him. That’s an end.

If we pursue these ends long enough they will eventually crowd out the surplus of means. And in the process we will be changed, changed to be a more accurate divine image-bearer like the ultimate end that we seek – Jesus Christ.

But what is the end; what is the grand mystery of our lives? What is the core meaning of our lives? Is it beyond comprehension? Is life too complex, too varied to fully grasp? I don’t think so, at least at life’s core. There is something that can be absolutely clear, even from the beginning. This goal, this over-arching purpose of our lives can be perfectly clear and should be clear. It should never be in doubt and should remain our grand vision until our lives are complete. When we hear it, it should resonate, it should ‘ring true.’ But often we fight this deep truth because it confronts us directly, correcting our natural bent by saying that we are not the purpose.

So this truth requires a humbling, a submission that we are often unprepared to make. We may intellectually see it, but it takes more than an intellectual assent.

Life’s core meaning consists of two sides:

1  To adore God. This is the God-ward side of life’s meaning, that is, it’s our relationship with God that is the ultimate end. As unbelievable as it may sound, we are called into an eternal love relationship, a relationship characterized by an exclusive, all-consuming, and intimate love with the living God, made accessible by the fact that he became the man, Jesus of Nazareth.

This loving relationship dates back to the beginning. Listen to the schema:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. — Deuteronomy 6:4

The primacy of love is sealed with Christ’s own words when he was asked for the greatest commandment:

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”

Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” — Matthew 22:36–40

Adoring God may seem like a tall order, but it can easily be seen through the eyes of the humblest among us – our children. From the time they make their first eye contact, our children adore their mother and father; our children’s lives revolve around us, they receive their nourishment, cleansing, learning, warning, everything from us. As they grow older, little boys follow their fathers and want to be like them and begin to mirror them: hammering, mowing, throwing, fixing. Likewise little girls want to be like their mothers: cooking, nurturing, mending, homemaking.[2] If they’re loved and nurtured, children’s faces naturally light up and want to please their parents; they want to be with them constantly. And to be separated from their parents, for any amount of time is, for them, an unbearable punishment. This alone should teach us a lesson.

This is a parable of adoration. Apparently, it is a divinely-ordained illustration of our relationship to him, our Heavenly Father.

So how do we begin to adore God? Simply trying harder doesn’t work, nor will an emotional appeal or manipulation, even with the purest of motives. No, we will adore God, responsively and effortlessly, by simply seeing who he truly is, by experiencing him – hearing, seeing, waiting, walking with him. Along the way we discover first-hand that he is great and good and worthy of our absolute devotion.

Listen to Paul’s admonition:

And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma. — Ephesians 4:32–5:2

Life’s core meaning also consists of a second and equally important purpose:

2  To glorify God. This is the world-ward side of life’s meaning, that is, it’s what we display to the world. It’s who we become and what we do as a result of our adoration of God. We become the image bearers that God originally intended us to be. The more we adore God, the more we will do what he does and therefore reflect his true image to those around us.

This purpose is not hard to come by – it’s been in circulation for millennia and remains unchanged in many circles. We find one articulate expression of that purpose in the Westminster catechism:

Q. What is the chief end of man?
A.  Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

This glorification literally happened to Moses as a result of his devotion to God and from prolonged sitting in his presence. When Moses came down from the mountain his face shone; he literally became glorified and glorified God at the same time.

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write these words, for according to the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” So he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.

Now it was so, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai (and the two tablets of the Testimony were in Moses’ hand when he came down from the mountain), that Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone while he talked with Him. So when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him. . . .And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face. But whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with Him, he would take the veil off until he came out; and he would come out and speak to the children of Israel whatever he had been commanded. And whenever the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face shone, then Moses would put the veil on his face again, until he went in to speak with Him. — Exodus 34:27–35

Beyond this core meaning, our lives are truly an unfolding mystery which will only finally be revealed at the end of time when the sons of God will be revealed.

See also the introduction to this category: Lies attacking our self-understanding.

[1] Scruton, Roger, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, St Augustine’s Press, South Bend, IN 2000, pg 32.

[2] I realize these actions are associated with traditional parental roles. I also understand that today’s mothers and fathers create new blends of traditional and non-traditional. But in God’s order, we must be careful not to ‘make the commandment of God of no effect by our tradition.’ In other words, some mothers may chop wood and some fathers may cook. That in itself is not wrong.